Any free-tier solutions for heavy read-write personal projects?
Greetings readers,
I need some wisdom from all of your experienced and enthusiastic devs on one web project I want to make as a hobby and for personal use.
[Note:
- I am not a web developer, also I don't know much about the backend but I'll learn that through this project.
- I am not looking for advice related to how I should implement the project code-wise, as I want to figure out that fun part myself.
]
Some context:
- I want to create a web app for reading books and research papers that are present as pdfs on my GitHub repo.
- I want to create the web app in a way that can maintain all the user history, like last page user left reading and the pages that user has read(in case user jumps to some arbitrary page of the file)
- I want the above info to be recorded even if the site is closed or the browser is closed(I assume I need to write at every page visit)
- I want to maintain tags to group the files as well.
- Allow users to add their books and other docs.
Basically, I want to create a library app on the web and maintain the data for now.
Now the thing is, I don't want to invest money in this and don't want to pay for deployment and hosting costs and DB maintaining costs.
Are there any reasonable solutions in the market that have some free tiers good enough to let me achieve this?
I am planning to only use the project myself or share it with <10-20 friends.
Please let me know if you folks are aware of some good solutions for this, thank you 🙂
(Also recommendations of some good tech-stack are also welcome as I am doing this purely for learning purpose)
15 Replies
the free tier of any database provider should be good enough for this at the scale you're describing
default recommendation would be planetscale's hobby tier
In case I accidentally cross the limits then I'd need to pay on planetscale and they also take our card info before starting, is their an option that won't take my card info?
For self hosted solutions a lot of the time they go with sqlite if you want to consider that. It should work fine for your needs
ik you said you don't want to spoiled how stuff is done but there is quite the world out there of unknowns. Looking at some projects like calibre would be helpful in mapping the domain/problem space
Thank you for the suggestion. Also, any info regarding platforms for hosting and other stuff?
I have a server I self host on in my room but you can basically do the same using any cloud provider equivalent of an ec2 but you will paying for networking fees on top of costs for running compute.
I’m assuming you want to keep costs down since it’s not really meant to be a commercial thing?
You probably won’t find any that will allow this
I’m assuming tho
try elephantSQL, afaik is posgresql.
free plan unli time but limited size
I saw their free tier, neon or supabase are many times giving more
thx for the information ill use it next time
the limit is 1 billion row reads a month
youre not hitting that
Thank you for the info everyone
I just don't want to enter my card info😅
Don't they not using that info just to verify you are real person and not creating multiple accounts to abuse the free tier
I see, still quite concerning, also doesn't sound like a good enough reason
as I can have multiple CCs
I came across
- vercel for frontend
- shuttle.rs for backend(guess I need to use rust)
- planetscale for DB
If any good suggestions comparable to or better than them, please mention them 😄
I want to use Postgres but planetscale only supports mysql, is there a good alternative?
I also came across cockroachDB(horrible name) but it seems like it misses some Postgres capabilities
Do you know what you will benefit from using postgres? Honestly, unless you are a database wiz and want to utilize Postgresql syntax, you are likely going to be using some kind of ORM (e.g. prisma) and won't likely see benefits from a specific database. Given the scale of your application, as long as what you have is an SQL database, I wouldn't stress too much about.
Of course if you need postgres then hopefully you find something, I wouldn't be too sure past planetscale.
Neon is postgress
I see, that's a good point, but my thought process was that postgres is popular in industry and I want to learn it, so I'll use it in my current project to get hands of experience.
I know I can use mysql, even sqlite, and I would use them if there are no alternatives.
thanks for the suggestion